What's your story?

Posted on November 06, 2021 by Greg Myers, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

The stories we tell ourself are a window into how we make sense of the world. I’m talking about the stories we Believe about ourself. The stories we Know, deep down, are True.

“To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

Our stories guide our choices, actions, even perceptions. They act as a quick filter and cataloguer for our experiences. Rather than figure out every experience from scratch (which would be exhausting, right?), we slot our experiences into stories. If something doesn’t quite fit, we give it a quick trim or a bit of a nudge, and move on.

What story do you tell that defines you? Something that you simply Know is True? I was riding in a car with someone when a hubcap suddenly came off and went rolling down the road. As we stopped to retrieve it, the driver said, “When something like this happens, I always wonder what great thing I just missed out on.” This hubcap event sent him into a funk that colored the rest of our journey!

The stories we tell ourselves, like any habit, sometimes help us and sometimes, not so much. Our circumstances and knowledge regularly change, but we don’t always update our stories – so we can be making sense of the world based on outdated information and limited perspectives. And this matters because the stories we tell ourselves have real impacts on our health, our relationships – our whole lives.

So a useful to question to ask might be “Is my story serving me?” If not… Are you willing to consider the possibility that there may be more to your story – other ways of looking at it, understanding it, other contexts that might put this story in a whole new light? Maybe there are entirely new stories you could tell, yet to be discovered?

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” – Aristotle

As you go through your day, try to notice the stories you tell yourself. What are the themes? The underlying assumptions? The habitual responses? Write them out – what does your story explain or protect? Who is the hero, who is the villain? What is the conflict, how does it end? Then on a clean sheet of paper, update your story – how do YOU want to write it?

Give yourself permission to play, and see what changing the story does to change your story.